Chapter 1 - 01: Rebirth
—
Crackle... Crackle...
Kai’s eyes flickered open to an oppressive darkness—a darkness so deep it seemed to swallow every stray thought. At first, he could feel nothing but the cold, unyielding grip of silence. Slowly, fragments of consciousness began to trickle back, like weak droplets of memory fighting through a twisted storm. As his vision adapted to the dark, otherworldly light, he could see that he lay in an ocean of nothingness. All around him, in torn heaps, were the bodies of thousands of corpses, their bodies twisted and dead. This was not a normal human graveyard—an ant graveyard, a gruesome plain upon which death had rained down in abundant measures.
"Where am I? What’s going on here?"
Kai simply sat there for a moment, attempting to make sense of what had happened. His head was a crazed whirl of half-remembered trivia of an ancient past. He recalled flashes of human life—a life that had been one of suffering, sacrifice, and brutal betrayal. In the final moments of that life, when all was bleak, he’d been a gallant man, laying down his own life to save a beautiful woman whom he had loved to the best of his abilities.
The memory now is as indistinct as a half-forgotten dream, but the anguish is inescapable. He could see, in spasms of agony and self-reproach, his girlfriend—the woman for whom he had gambled everything. Only now was a wicked realization forming in his dying brain: she had conspired to have him murdered so that she could inherit his wealth.
Even as life left his fleshy body, a flame of defiance had smouldered in his heart. Grasping a stiff, unyielding gun from one of the men who had set upon him, he screamed.
"If I die, I’ll kill you with me!"
And at the last instant, he had discharged it, trapping both their spirits in an anaemic flash of radiance that shivered the very heavens.
At that moment Kai sees a light come from the sky. It made a circle around him and the girlfriend dying body. For 0.000001 second the time of earth stopped. Then everything became dark.
Now, in this suffocating darkness, Kai’s body felt...different. A creeping numbness pulsed beneath his chitinous skin, and his once-familiar human form was gone. His new, diminutive limbs twitched involuntarily as he tried to reconcile these sensations with the memories of his past self. Confusion warred with disbelief.